


Butterfly Words

by pie_is_good



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 02:45:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pie_is_good/pseuds/pie_is_good
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marty McFly inherits the time train, and he realizes there's one thing he wants to see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Butterfly Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



When Emmett Brown died, his children had long since grown up, their own time machines and lives and places to live, and Clara had already gone. Doc had only one person left in his life to leave something very important to in his will.

That’s how Marty McFly got a time train.

It worked much better than it had in the past. Not like the DeLorean, rickety and terrifying. It was nearly foolproof, the letter claimed, but Marty didn’t know if he wanted to ride in it, ever again. Especially not without Doc. The train remained where Doc had left it for him, and he hadn’t even visited it. He didn’t even know if it was still there and still worked. If it had ever even been there.

A year later, he realized it was 2015. The year he’d visited with Doc. He had been so much younger, then, and life had been so much more interesting. He didn’t mind the kids and the wife and the mortgage, but, somehow, time traveling and knocking guns out of hands with pie tins and accidentally making your parents not meet had been so much more exciting. The Hoverboard had been a nice bonus.

That’s how he found himself driving down the highway, carefully following the instructions just like he had when he found the DeLorean in 1955, with a younger Doc. He’d done it in nearly the same fashion, though the train had need a much larger cavern and Marty had a much harder time locating explosives than Doc had.

When he climbed into the engine, he looked at the all-too-familiar controls. Sure, Doc had spruced them up a bit over the years, but they were still essentially the same as they had been that very first day he had accidentally time traveled while he tried to outrun the Libyans. His hand hovered over the keypad, unsure what date to input. He’d already been to the recent past, the recent future, and the Old West. He thought about returning to the eighties, reminiscing about his own teenage years, but it seemed a little dangerous to go somewhere he existed again. That wasn’t an experience he was likely to want to repeat.

He drummed his fingers on top of the display, thinking carefully. A fleeting thought nearly convinced him to set it for the future, going through with his original plan with Gray’s Sports Almanac, but he decided against it. Doc would not have wanted him to do that.

He still might, someday, but at the very least, he wasn’t going to do it first.

Looking down, he picked up a piece of plastic that had fallen to the ground and wedged itself under a console. A California driver’s license; Doc’s.

That’s when Marty realized he knew where to go.

He wasn’t going to relive his own teenage years.

He was going to 1930.

He would get to see Doc’s.

***

He found Hill Valley in 1930 far more disconcerting than any other time period he had seen it in The future had been full of wonders; the past full of curious beginnings. 1955 had felt almost familiar, like the city had looked yesterday – the way his mother and father described it when they reminisced. But 1930? 1930 felt almost entirely foreign.

He finally found the Brown household after a few awkward conversations with people around him.

It hadn’t even occurred to him that he was arriving at the beginning of the depression, and as he walked up to the Brown household, he almost walked away immediately. He had intended to walk right up under a guise of a salesman, something he knew he could easily talk his way into, but the scene before him on their porch felt far more fascinating to simply observe. He settled down on a bench across the street, watching discreetly over the newspaper he had stolen out of a trash bin.

The family clearly looked worried, a man and a woman he assumed were Doc’s parents arguing over finances, but there was Doc, his nose stuck in book with twelve more piled on the rickety deck around him. On first glance, he looked oblivious to the worries of those around him, but, after closer inspection, he wasn’t. To a careful observer, he clearly knew exactly what was going on around him; he was just trying his hardest not to think about it.

As the noise between his parents grew, Doc selected a few of his books and headed across the street, towards Marty.

This would be his chance. He hadn’t realized what Doc had been like, a poor young boy with seemingly no friends beyond a thirst for knowledge and a good book. They were more alike than he realized; until Jennifer, Marty had never really had friends. Hell, he still didn’t. He played in a band still, some, but they were just people he happened to get together with and play music. They weren’t his friends.

It was the same with the books.

That’s when he realized something.

“Doc?” Marty said quietly, clearing his throat to cover up the word as it came out of his mouth. This was a sixteen year old kid, not a man with a doctorate who had known him for years. He wouldn’t answer to Doc.

“Emmett?” he tried again.

“Yes?” the boy said, looking at him with curious eyes that hadn’t been able to figure out quite how the strange man in front of him knew his name.

“Never give up,” Marty said, choosing his words carefully. “You never give up because one day, one day you will invent something wonderful.”

With that, Marty folded up his newspaper, leaving the teenaged Doc to have the bench to himself and think.

***

Twenty-five years into the future, the world was changing. Not just a little bit, a word misspoken that otherwise wouldn't have been or accidentally burning a finger. No, Emmett Brown's world changed quite a lot, into the world that had always been so, for Marty; he had never known a world without his Doc.

As Doc hit his head, he had a vision. The flux capacitor, of course, but it seemed silly, strange, just another horrible idea. He started to tend to the wound on his head, but as the world came back into focus through the pain, he started to remember a voice from long ago. The voice of a strange man who had spoken to him as a child, playing back in his head.

“Maybe,” Doc said to himself aloud, nearly running to a pad of paper and a pen to draw a crude sketch of the vision he might have otherwise ignored. “Just maybe, this is actually something real.”


End file.
